The consultation on housing in the county was a sham, as the whole process of local, strategic and regional planning for housing has been right the way through.

Good alternative ideas have been unwelcome for two years now! The option to put thousands of homes on the edge of the city is based on seriously flawed interpretations of the City Council’s own research. The others are an unacceptable, usually undemocratic imposition on smaller towns.

What the city council’s Labour group is proposing is in fact an overall increase in Oxford’s population of a nearly a fifth. Because the only way they can see of providing affordable housing is to allow lots of private market development.

What we need is a mechanism for sustainable use and reuse of what we already have – making the market match the need. Most people in the city’s housing needs survey are already based in the city – we just have severe problems affording what they are in. The absolute shortage of housing is only around a quarter of what the city’s planners have extrapolated from their research as a result.

We can expect more villages to become havens for the wealthy and their public services like schools, local shops and buses to wither and die. And acres of soulless developer boxes spreading out into South Oxfordshire no doubt pretending to be “communities”.